Experiment in Terror 05.5 Old Blood Read Free

of thing happened to me, I was a few years older and could no longer blame my mother’s stories for giving my gift fire. She had stopped telling them many years ago. It was the first time my special sight caused loss – I no longer had that closeness with my mother.
    I had started going to school in Ullapa, the closest town and would get a ride in every morning with our neighbor Arstand and his son Stäva. As you may recall, Arstand was the goat farmer who found me, along with my mother, floating in the lake when I was six. That explained why Arstand was always a bit jumpy with me, as if I was going to pop up and say “boo!” at any moment.
    But he tolerated me enough to fit me in his new vehicle and take me to school. My parents were still behind the times and my father shunned motor vehicles as being unnecessary idols and symbols of gluttony. I suppose he was right, but it was still a convenient way to get around.
    Stäva had ended up being my only, and, by default, closest friend. He was a bit strange and funny to look at but strange suited me just fine. He was small for his age and had ears that stuck out. Arstand called him “elefant.” It didn’t seem to bother Stäva much though. He had a sunny personality and loved to listen to me prattle on about this and that. He was also quite the adventurer and when we first started playing together we would explore the farm he lived on, climbing up into the haylofts and jumping onto the piles below or feeding the baby goats (when we weren’t chasing them around). My parents weren’t too happy that I was spending so much of my time away from home, but I suppose my mother felt she was in debt to Arstand and after a while they didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps it was a relief to them that someone else was taking care of me.
    It was at Stäva’s that I was introduced to more modern conveniences, aside from the car of course. Being a goat farmer was more profitable than being a minister and they had things such as a library and a radio. The library was a great place for me to sink my teeth, especially as I had learned to read at that point, but the radio trumped all. When I was there after school, his father, mother and two younger brothers would sit around the giant radio and listen to broadcasts coming out of Stockholm. I found the news to be boring, except when it touched on the troubles in Europe, but I lived for the plays and radio shows that played after. It was then that I fell in love with acting and the theatre. I couldn’t see the show of course, and I had never seen a performance in my life as church singing didn’t count to me, but I could envision it all in my head like I was there with the actors.
    “ I’m going to be on the radio one day,” I remember whispering into Stäva’s funny ear. We were sitting on the braided rug in his living room, a place that smelled like a mix of manure, sour milk and home baked bread. It doesn’t sound like a winning combination but it’s funny now how that smell makes me think of home, even though it wasn’t my home. It’s not that Stäva’s parents were particularly nice to me. Like I noted, Arstand was always watching me carefully. His wife Else was a nice woman but she seemed lost in her head more often than not and spent most of her time working with the goat cheese or doting on Stäva’s younger siblings. I wasn’t a pest to them but I wasn’t loved either. Yet I still had a sense of freedom and hope in their peculiar-smelling place.
    With the idea of being an actress in my head, I focused solely on that. I mentioned it once to my parents and ended up getting a belt across my thigh. It didn’t hurt. I was too angry for it to hurt. I was angry at my father for being so close-minded about his daughter’s dreams (for what were we without dreams) and at my mother for never sticking up for me. Ever since the lake incident, when she stopped with her stories, she stopped being my friend as well. It hurt more than